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Archive through October 22, 2001Dave20 10-22-01  6:41 pm
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Enigmabomb
Posted on Monday, October 22, 2001 - 8:51 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I have never read lord of the rings....Should I? Is this a classic I am missing out on?

-enigmabomb-
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Joancrystal
Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 - 5:55 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

4 classics actually and each one a must read! Start with the Hobbit. Then move on to the trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. finally, for the true addict, and you will become one, there is Tolkien Reader.
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Notehead
Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 - 6:52 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

You really owe it to yourself to check out the books Joan listed. Tolkien's skill is unsurpassed. Not only is his use of language incredible, but he simply comes up with more and better story elements than virtually anybody else. You'll be totally engaged by him.
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Dave
Posted on Monday, November 19, 2001 - 9:42 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Enigmabomb,
Tell me more about postgres, and especially its TEXT search capabilities. Eg., say a story exists in the database as a text field. What are the search options like? Does it allow boolean searches? What are the wildcards? I'm looking at alternatives to MySQL. (will be RTFM later this week, but seeing if you can offer advance info. TIA.)
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Enigmabomb
Posted on Monday, November 19, 2001 - 11:43 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

It does pretty standard SQL queries. I do believe there is some kind of 32,000 character limit though, I'll look into that. But It can do: SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE TEXTBOX CONTAINS "Stuff";
The wildcards seem to be *, and anything SQL has but wild card in a what sense? I don't think it allows boolean searches, but the functions used to call it in php can return null, or no results if memory serves...

One cool thing that I like, is that it is basically a free version of oracle.

-enigmabomb-
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Rwm00
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 11:30 am:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Enigmabomb --

Two questions, no particular order of importance,
is there a story behind your posting name (mine is just the one my e-mail provider gave me years ago) and is the University of Miami something you are seriously considering?

RWM00
U. of Miami, BA. 1981, JD. 1986.
Maplewood, 1991
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Dave
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 12:22 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I broke Enigmabomb's code a while ago. Here's an explanation:



Quote:


The Enigma cypher was the backbone of German military and intelligence communications. Invented in 1918, it was initially designed to secure banking communications, but achieved little success in that sphere. The German military, however, were quick to see its potential.

They thought it to be unbreakable, and not without good reason. Enigma's complexity was bewildering. Typing in a letter of plain German into the machine sent electrical impulses through a series of rotating wheels, electrical contacts and wires to produce the encyphered letter, which lit up on a panel above the keyboard. By typing the resulting code into his own machine, the recipient saw the decyphered message light up letter by letter. The rotors and wires of the machine could be configured in many, many different ways. The odds against anyone who did not know the settings being able to break Enigma were a staggering 150 million million million to one.

The Poles had broken Enigma in 1932, when the encoding machine was undergoing trials with the German Army. They even managing to reconstruct a machine. At that time, the cypher altered only once every few months. With the advent of war, it changed at least once a day, effectively locking the Poles out. But in July 1939, they had passed on their knowledge to the British and the French. This enabled the codebreakers to make critical progress in working out the order in which the keys were attached to the electrical circuits, a task that had been impossible without an Enigma machine in front of them.

Armed with this knowledge, the codebreakers were then able to exploit a chink in Enigma's armour. A fundamental design flaw meant that no letter could ever be encrypted as itself; an A in the original message, for example, could never appear as an A in the code. This gave the codebreakers a toehold. Errors in messages sent by tired, stressed or lazy German operators also gave clues. In January 1940 came the first break into Enigma.

It was in Huts 3,6,4 and 8 that the highly effective Enigma decrypt teams worked. The huts operated in pairs and, for security reasons, were known only by their numbers. The codebreakers concentrating on the Army and Air Force cyphers were based in Hut 6, supported by a team in the neighbouring Hut 3 who turned the decyphered messages into intelligence reports. Hut 8 decoded messages from the German Navy, with Hut 4 the associated naval intelligence hut. Their raw material came from the 'Y' Stations: a web of wireless intercept stations dotted around Britain and in a number of countries overseas. These stations listened in to the enemy's radio messages and sent them to Bletchley Park to be decoded and analysed.

To speed up the codebreaking process, the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing developed an idea originally proposed by Polish cryptanalysts. The result was the Bombe: an electro-mechanical machine that greatly reduced the odds, and thereby the time required, to break the daily-changing Enigma keys.



http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
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Enigmabomb
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 4:12 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Heh, Very good dave. I am a person of great complexity, I just didn't think anyone would pick up on the enigma machine part.

-enigmabomb-
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Enigmabomb
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 4:16 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I don't know, It's all about the computer science department. Next year I will be seriously looking at schools, this year I am just sort of exploring options.

-enigmabomb-
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Dave
Posted on Friday, December 14, 2001 - 10:54 am:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Something you may be interested in about wireless and the need for open-source computing:

Computers in the Woodwork at CoolTown


Quote:

....[A]s Becker (from HP) puts it: "We don't want individual companies to gain unfair architectural control over how the physical and virtual worlds are connected. That would allow them to suck the value out of the industry. That's one reason why we're moving some of the software we've developed into an open source development community. We want to see a world, where like the early days of the Web, anybody with the skill and interest and some ideas can create novel applications for themselves or their friends or to create a business out of it."

If Bill Gates' house represents a proprietary vision of tomorrow, perhaps CoolTown presents a viable alternative. If today's mobile telephone will morphing into something more like a remote control for the physical world, very different social outcomes depend on whether the remote control medium is an open system like the web, or a closed system like a proprietary operating system.


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Enigmabomb
Posted on Friday, December 14, 2001 - 4:57 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Neat Stuff. I really like wireless, I think I even convinced my parents to go wireless. Now the real question, is how it will play with the wireless network next door. MapleNet is slowly coming together. =)

-enigmabomb-
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Enigmabomb
Posted on Friday, December 14, 2001 - 5:02 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Hmm, I don't know Dave, I think they seem some marketing guys, because I don't want to get e-squirted.

-enigmabomb-
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Dave
Posted on Sunday, January 6, 2002 - 7:39 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Enigmabomb,

Please clear your Yahoo! email account or put a new one in both your user profile for the board as well as in the PrivateLine system. (it's at max capacity and bounced mails are returning to my server). Thanks!
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Enigmabomb
Posted on Monday, January 7, 2002 - 12:02 am:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Sorry Dave!! I have had an influx of mail. I am almost tempted to setup my own email so I can have unlimited space. Any knowledge of sendmail or qmail? What does MOL use? I just got this poweredge, I think I have a use for it now.

-enigmabomb-
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Justmelaura
Citizen
Username: Justmelaura

Post Number: 159
Registered: 5-2001
Posted on Sunday, July 28, 2002 - 11:32 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

HELP!


wow, look at all this crap i figured out how to do, just when i annihilated my computer.

sheesh!
I need help, real help.
so, in the immortal words of Blondie, Call Me!

jml
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Lambda Lover
Citizen
Username: Lambdalover

Post Number: 2
Registered: 4-2003
Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 12:27 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Hi Enigmabomb. I wish I'd had someone who could have given me advice when I was your age. I'll just throw out whatever I can in the time I've got.

The first thing that you should do is learn about Richard Feynman. He wrote a book called "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" that was very popular (just a short kind of autobiographical book). Feynman won a Nobel for his fundamental work on Quantum Electrodynamics (a theory that describes how light and matter interact). He was one of the most down-to-Earth personalities in his field at the time (really you'd think all physicists would be that way). I'm sure that he'll inspire you.

I'm not sure what aspect of programming you're into, but websites like flipcode.com, gamasutra.com, ai-depot.com will go a long way toward instilling in you the important concepts of a number of subsets of programming-related problems (but they're game/graphics development oriented sites).

Math is very important. There are a lot of working programmers who'd disagree with me, but I think that it's very important to have an intuitive grasp of as much of mathematics as you can (at the very least it increases the number of programs you can write). Don't dismiss the history of math either -- I think it's very useful for solidfying that intuitive understanding that's so important. Studying the history will also help you see common themes in math over the years -- like the conflict between symbolic representations and geometric representations of mathematical concepts (the perfect example is in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz -- Newton was like a classical geometer and Leibniz was the leading man in symbolic math), and in a deeper sense the theory of numbers (why the set of real numbers is 'bigger' than the set of integers -- and what implications this has for scientific models based on frameworks that depend on either one).

It also helps very much to be able to put computation in the larger framework of the functioning of the entire universe. There are theoretical limits to computation (it's not true that all numbers that mathematicians can define can be computed -- that's true for more than just the trivial case of infinite precision; there are also numbers that can't be computed to any precision at all).

Read Knuth if you can stand it (don't try to read his books like novels -- you might spend a week on one page or you might spend a lifetime). There are tons of important computational concepts that have to be learned. Things like encryption, compression, machine learning, computational geometry, formal grammars, numerical analysis, and on and on. You might also check out Stephen Wolfram's new book ("A New Kind of Science") -- it'll probably save you the effort of finding out on your own that things like grammars and cellular automata share a common computational foundation.

Watch these lectures:

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/

And don't ever give up. There's so much to learn and it's such a short life! You're not always going to have people around who'll appreciate what you do. You've got to become comfortable with that idea.

Well I hope I've helped.
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enigmabomb
Citizen
Username: Enigmabomb

Post Number: 282
Registered: 7-2001
Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 5:36 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Awesome guidance. I have the Knuth, Art of computer programming volume 1... You aren't kidding about the lifetime part =) I really appreciate the time it took you to pool all these rescources together for me! It's obvious you are quite the erudite. Thanks for your help.

-enigmabomb-
-enigmabomb-
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Phil
Citizen
Username: Barleyrooty

Post Number: 641
Registered: 5-2001


Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2003 - 10:49 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Since the topic has been started, I'll throw my 2c in too:

Other absolutely essential coolest ever books to read on math and programming are:

Elements of Programming Style, Brian W. Kernighan, P. J. Plauger. This little book is a classic - all programmers should read it. It's a bit hard to find but maybe the library can get it for you.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0070342075/qid=1054263060/sr=1-4/r ef=sr_1_4/103-8562767-3784603?v=glance&s=books

Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465026567/qid=1054263189/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2 _1/103-8562767-3784603

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flugermongers
Citizen
Username: Flugermongers

Post Number: 22
Registered: 5-2001
Posted on Friday, May 30, 2003 - 8:14 am:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

enigmabomb,
do you have parents, siblings, or anyone else that attended columbia, that could help you out with the college process?
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enigmabomb
Citizen
Username: Enigmabomb

Post Number: 283
Registered: 7-2001
Posted on Saturday, May 31, 2003 - 8:09 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Phil-
I'll definitely check out that Kernighan book, I really liked THe C Pl by him and Ritchie.
Monger-
No one else in my immediate family has attended columbia. I am working through this supposed 'process'. I have narrowed it down to a few schools: University of Miami (In Florida), University or Arizona, Arizona State, and maybe USC. Now it's just a matter of trying to get in.

-enigmabomb-
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enigmabomb
Citizen
Username: Enigmabomb

Post Number: 299
Registered: 7-2001
Posted on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - 8:56 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I'm graduating high school AND going to college. (Arizona State University!)

By the way, I now have a website that I love to whore all over the place. Especially since I'm looking for a non-computer job.

-Josh

www.MyAuntIsHot.com
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Joan
Citizen
Username: Joancrystal

Post Number: 3133
Registered: 5-2001
Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 - 9:17 am:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

enigmabomb:

Great to hear from you again. Best of luck at Arizona State. What are you studying?
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enigmabomb
Citizen
Username: Enigmabomb

Post Number: 300
Registered: 7-2001
Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 - 4:55 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Not computers! I've grown to hate them (Rather, I've grown to hate working on them for money). I'm trying my hardest to get into the professional aviation program.

-Josh
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Joan
Citizen
Username: Joancrystal

Post Number: 3141
Registered: 5-2001
Posted on Sunday, June 20, 2004 - 12:21 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Enjoy whatever you choose and don't pressure yourself to select a major too quickly. College is an experience which should be savored. There is a whole wonderful world out there. A good college education will open you up to possibilities you never knew existed.

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